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Electrician’s Arm Goes to Sleep After Rear-end Collision

Following a rear-end collision, our client could not shake the pain, weakness, and tingling from his neck down his arm. He even noted that his arm would typically go to sleep every evening when he got home, and that he would have to get up from the couch and shake his arm out to get the feeling back into it. It would also happen sometimes at work when he was working on a ladder or crawling around pulling electrical wires.

A routine cervical spine MRI showed a disc herniation, but more specific information was later gleaned from a Digital Motion X-ray study of his neck. The DMX showed that one of the neural foramen (the hole where the nerve roots exit from the spinal cord to the body) on the right side of his spine would clamp down on the nerve root in certain head positions – most notably the right oblique head position.

In speaking with his surgeon, it came out that he usually watched TV from the couch in the evenings and that it was then that he could consistently count on his arm “going to sleep”. It turns out that the DMX head position and the head position from his couch to his TV matched up exactly, and that it was nerve root compression that caused those symptoms, not a lack of circulation which causes a limb to “go to sleep.”

Following a surgical procedure to remove the damaged disc and fuse that entire level together, our client felt much better, and Dennis Phillips was able to settle with the at-fault driver’s insurer for its policy limits, even though they had only offered $800 to settle with this man’s previous attorney, prior to the DMX and surgery.